The site was launched in September by the seasoned SEO Dave Naylor, and provides some valuable tools for site optimization.

Zippy’s design is similar to Technorati’s new design, with a minimalist white background and lots of bright colors. The site is pretty easy to use, and has a slick feel with the help of some ajax. It took only a few minutes worth of playing around to really get a grasp on the functionality. However, a tutorial or features page, would be nice to help introduce the functionally to a new user.

The basic search functionality for Zippy queries Google, Yahoo!, MSN and Ask and mashes the results together. It then ranks the results among the four.

As you can see from the screenshot there’s plenty more going on than just meta search. First, Zippy shows related searches from each search engine to help find other like keyword phrases. Next, it takes all of those results and shows which pages are in multiple search engines (if any) and ranks them down the page. The results in more than one search engine (ie. Google and Yahoo and MSN) will rank higher.

You can find more about each result’s domain if you click the little orange arrow next to the term. (You can also access this via the sidebar or the homepage.) This will return a plethora of useful information about the domain like age, IP, sites on IP, Google PageRank, all sorts of backlink data, and Alexa rank.

You can get even more detailed data about any domain if you do a Domain Information search. This is where Zippy really shines as you can find:

You can also search the top 10 sites for a keyword. This feature shows an Alexa graph for the top five domains and their traffic, followed the used tags for each domain. This table shows each tag (ie <title>, <h1>, etc.) and the number of words per tag, number of keyword occurrences, and the keyword density. Below that shows the top 10 domains’ backlink and search engine index information across the main four search engines plus Alexa and Technorati data.

Another feature is domain comparison. Basically you can pit any two domains against each other and it will show the Alexa information plus backlink and index information, much like the domain search mentioned above.

Zippy is a handy tool for doing quick market research for free. The fact that you don’t have to use multiple tools to get the same amount of data helps the speed the process up quite a bit. It’s fairly simple to use, but could use a little more information or direction for the new user.

About Lee Odden
Lee Odden is the CEO of TopRank Online Marketing, a provider of innovative Internet marketing consulting for progressive B2B companies ranging from Marketo to PRWeb to McKesson. Odden has been recognized for his expertise with enterprise social media, SEO and content marketing strategies by The Economist, Advertising Age and Mashable. He writes a monthly column called Social Media Smarts for ClickZ and his blog at TopRankBlog.com has an active community with over 46,000 subscribers, 12,000 Facebook Fans and has been rated the #1 Content Marketing blog 3 times by Junta42. He is also the Author of "Optimize: How to Attract and Engage More Customers by Integrating SEO, Social Media and Content Marketing" published by Wiley. View all posts by Lee Odden →